Display Drivers

The latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code for supporting the Radeon X1000 (R500) series hardware has basically reached a point of competitiveness with the legacy Catalyst Linux driver that once supported this hardware. In some cases the open-source Gallium3D driver is now faster than what Catalyst once ran at while in other select OpenGL workloads there is still a proprietary imbalance.

The Linux 3.5 kernel is capable of delivering some massive performance gains for some of the more recent generations of ATI/AMD Radeon graphics processors. Here's some benchmarks showing the hefty performance gains found when using the latest kernel that is still being developed.

Up as an extra article from Munich is a comparison of Intel DRM drivers on recent Linux kernel releases while using Core i7 Ivy Bridge hardware. With the Linux 3.4 kernel there are definite Intel Linux graphics performance gains.

Now having compared the graphics driver performance between Microsoft Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 Linux for the NVIDIA driver with the GeForce GTX 680 and the multi-platform Intel performance for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, here's a look at the AMD Catalyst driver performance with the Radeon HD 7950 graphics card when running between Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux.

Up for publishing today is a multi-card multi-driver comparison spanning several generations of discrete ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards looking at the Radeon OpenGL performance as found by default in Ubuntu 12.04, as found when updating to the latest "Git" development code, when tweaking the latest development code for maximum performance, and finally when using the proprietary AMD Catalyst Linux display driver.

As the Intel Ivy Bridge benchmarks being delivered on Phoronix and coming up in the coming days are frequently using the latest Intel Linux graphics development stack, for those curious here is a comparison between the stock Ubuntu 12.04 packages and when running the latest Linux kernel / Mesa / libdrm / xf86-video-intel Git DDX.

Going back to last year there's been the "Glamor Acceleration" project out of Intel to accelerate the 2D operations within X using OpenGL on Mesa. This is similar to the Xorg state tracker approach and while it's not yet enabled by default, Intel OTC developers have been making much progress in recent months. In this article is a look at the recent Glamor update while comparing it to the stock Intel UXA acceleration as well as to the other experimental acceleration option: Intel SNA.

Last week the R600 LLVM compiler was hooked up for AMD's open-source Gallium3D driver. This LLVM shader compiler is important particularly for OpenCL enablement within the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver, but still there is some ways to go before that code is ready for production use.

Thanks to clean-room reverse-engineering, it is already possible to run the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics card on a fully open-source graphics driver complete with OpenGL acceleration. Here are the first benchmarks of this work-in-progress, community-created open-source GeForce 600 series graphics driver.

Committed to the Mesa and libdrm Git repositories last week for Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver, was the "major libdrm rewrite" designed to step-up this reverse-engineered driver. What impact did these invasive changes have on the Nouveau driver's performance? Here are benchmarks comparing before-and-after as well as how the Nouveau driver compares to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.